Lincolnshire Police is working towards ITIL accreditation, in line with the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) directive. The ‘Information Systems Strategy for the Police Service’ (ISS4PS) directive, which lays down a framework to improve police performance and efficiencies, has made ITIL a required practice for all forces across the country.
The force’s adoption of IT service management software Sostenuto by Sunrise will be instrumental in helping it to successfully pass the inspection carried out by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabularies (HMIC) next year. Problem manager Amy Johnson said: “Sostenuto plays a key part in our plans to achieve ITIL accreditation. Not only does it provide us with all of the features we need to standardise our processes along ITIL guidelines, but its user friendly, intuitive interface has also allowed us to be up and running extremely quickly.”
Lincolnshire Police had previously been using Sunrise’s client server software Enterprise, and decided to adopt Sostenuto after evaluating a number of alternatives. “We knew from working with Sunrise previously that we could rely on them to provide us with an excellent service and the transition from Enterprise has gone incredibly smoothly,” said Amy.
Since going live in June this year, Sostenuto has been adopted by the force’s service desk, desktop support, communications support and the configuration teams to centralise all of their calls. The software underpins the management of up to 300 calls a day from 2,500 staff across this large county. With incident and asset management well embedded in the team’s working processes (and 75% of calls being closed on first line, by the service desk), it is now working towards problem management.
“By introducing Sostenuto we have been forced to be more vigilant with our housekeeping,” says Amy. “It has contributed to us creating a service catalogue and other benefits have included tighter asset management, escalation processes and better SLA performance.”
Users are currently able to log calls via email and the next stage will be to phase in self service interface Chameleon, providing end-users with the ability to log and track their own calls in the future.